Cuban Eyes Focus on Leader Who Isn’t There

Raúl Castro, Cuba’s acting leader, next to the empty chair of his brother, Fidel, at a parliamentary meeting Friday in Havana. When Fidel Castro presided over meetings from that chair, he asked many questions.

By MARC LACEY
Published: December 23, 2006
MEXICO CITY, Dec. 22 — Cuba’s acting leader, Raúl Castro, sat silently as the country’s Parliament opened its year-end session in Havana on Friday, and all eyes were on the empty chair next to him from which his elder brother, Fidel, usually presides.

The first meeting of the National Assembly since Fidel Castro went into surgery in late July was, according to news service reports, much like many other legislative sessions in Havana: bland.

But this one was watched closely just in case the ailing octogenarian leader, who used to pepper underlings with questions, showed up — he did not — or in the unlikely event that the Assembly opened a debate on the island’s future.
read more

Maryland High Court Calls Halt to Executions

Lethal Injection Blocked Over Procedural Issue

By Eric Rich and John Wagner
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; Page B01

Maryland's highest court ruled yesterday that the state's procedure for carrying out executions was adopted improperly, a defect that the court said must be addressed before any more condemned inmates are put to death.

The unanimous ruling by the Court of Appeals moved the debate squarely into the political realm, where Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) or his Democratic successor, Martin O'Malley, must act if executions are to resume.
read more

Zahn: Show on Racism Provokes Strong Reaction

By Paula Zahn
CNN

NEW YORK (CNN) -- After ex-"Seinfeld" star Michael Richards' bigoted tirade at a comedy club last month, my staff and I started talking about what could possibly drive a person to say such vile and hateful things.

This discussion raised a series of questions we decided to explore on our program: Is there an inner racist in many of us, just waiting to explode? And is racism thriving today, just underneath a well-masked surface of political correctness and civility?

As we started gathering research on these questions, we read about Vidor, Texas, an East Texas community of 11,000 formerly known as a "sundown town," a place where African-Americans weren't welcome after dark. Like many other towns around the United States in the early 20th century, Vidor was rather open about being closed to blacks.

So we decided to find out what this town looks like today and how its legacy of racism has affected its efforts to integrate and heal the wounds of years past.

We sent correspondent Keith Oppenheim, who filed a memorable report from Vidor last week showing that much progress has been made.read more

California Seeks To Improve Lethal Injection Method

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered his staff on Monday to fix the state's use of lethal injection for executions so it satisfies a federal judge who declared it unconstitutional.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel in an opinion issued on Friday wrote that California's use of lethal injection was such a mess as to be "broken," but he said it could be fixed to withstand constitutional challenges.

"When properly administered, lethal injection results in a death that is far kinder than that suffered by the victims of capital crimes," Fogel wrote.

"At the present time, however, defendants' implementation of California's lethal-injection protocol lacks both reliability and transparency," he wrote.

Fogel wrote that in six executions the prisoners may not have been properly sedated when the dose of a lethal chemical was administered. The judge gave the state 30 days to let him know how they planned to fix the system
read more

Is Obama The New "Black"?

By Gregory Rodriguez:

The possible presidential candidacy of the biracial senator has sparked an illuminating debate on race.

WE KNOW this: Barack Obama is a rising star. He's a powerful speaker and a gifted writer. He is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. But is he black?

That's what New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch asked last month, and his answer was decidedly "no." No, Crouch wasn't just employing the old "blacker than thou" canard. Nor was he concerned with the fact that Obama was raised by his white mother. Rather, he was treating blackness not just as a racial (shared biology) identity but as an ethnic (shared historical experience) one. And isn't that what the switch of terms from "black" to "African American" was all about?

Think back to the late 1980s, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson became the most prominent black to call for the adoption of the term African American. "Just as we were called colored, but were not that," he said, "and then Negro, but not that, to be called black is just as baseless…. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of maturity." The problem, of course, is that most black Americans are descendants of slaves who had their African cultural heritage brutally stripped from them.read more